A Year of Crisis

A Year of Crisis

Faber / good info on History 1956 -just reading 

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As 2016 draws to a close, world leaders, newspaper commentators, and ordinary citizens are struggling to make sense of what has been, by any reckoning, an extraordinary year. From the vote for Brexit to the election of Donald J. Trump, and from the attempted coup in Turkey to the bloody end to the siege of Aleppo, 2016 will surely enter the annals of history as a watershed moment in our own era.

Sixty years ago, it was a similar story. Writing in the Observer on 30 December 1956, for instance, the Jewish German émigré Richard Löwenthal looked back at a year of “crises and catastrophes” that had shaken the old order to its foundations. With attempted revolutions in Hungary and Cuba; a year-long boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama and mass protests against apartheid in South Africa; a deepening crisis in Algeria – where the French had become embroiled in a vicious war of counter-insurgency against the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale); and the dramatic denouement to the Suez crisis, which had ended in a triumph for President Nasser, and the humiliation of Britain and France, there was certainly much to ponder.

While it takes a brave – or possibly foolish – historian to make predictions about the future, the story of 1956 does have some relevance for today, not least for the fact that, as we shall see, sorting out the ‘victors’ from the ‘vanquished’ in the immediate aftermath of political and social tumult is no easy task.

In December 1956, for instance, Fidel Castro’s attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista appeared doomed. Following a disastrous landing aboard the Granma on December 2, almost the entire band of revolutionaries had been killed or captured; and the New York Times even (erroneously) reported the death of Fidel, and that of his brother Raúl, as “fact”. Having noted Castro’s arrival in Cuba in its leader column on December 4, The Times of London confidently swatted aside its significance. Noting that Batista was a “veteran of many revolutions”, it predicted that: “it is unlikely that the latest will shake his position”. In fact, after regrouping amidst the relative sanctuary of the Sierra Maestra mountains, Fidel went on to launch a remarkable military campaign, which – with the support of the urban-based opposition, the labour movement and others – culminated in his triumphant march into Havana on January 8, 1959, and the opening of a new chapter in the history of the twentieth century.

In a battered and bludgeoned Budapest, meanwhile, where Nikita Khrushchev had despatched tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks to crush a revolution that had briefly captured the imagination of much of the world, the mood was fearful and gloomy. Although the new government of János Kadar moved quickly to ban newspapers and organisations, bear down on worker dissent, and round up prominent revolutionaries, student leaders and intellectuals, for millions of ordinary Hungarians the years that followed the failed uprising were actually a good deal better than many had feared. The harsh repression that accompanied the restoration of Communist rule proved temporary, and Kádár’s government offered a number of reforms, unprecedented in the Soviet bloc, to try and win over the population (or, at least, gain their grudging acceptance). Access to higher education was opened up, the Communist Party’s monopoly on technical and administrative posts was eased, a greater degree of religious and cultural freedom was permitted, and Hungarians were allowed to travel to the West (in 1954, fewer than 100 private citizens had done so; by 1962, the figure was 120,000). There were changes, too, in agricultural and economic policy that made space for private enterprise and rewarded individual talent and effort. The economy also did well: in the decade that followed the revolution, real wages increased by 47%, and Hungarians enjoyed greater access to consumer goods, and a higher standard of living, than their contemporaries in East Germany, Poland and Romania. Moreover, Hungarians were no longer expected to attend compulsory political meetings, enthusiastically applaud the Party line, or make public demonstrations of allegiance to communism: in Kádár’s famously cynical phrase, “he who is not against us is with us.” Hungary was on its way to becoming the “happiest barracks in Eastern Europe.”

In Montgomery, Alabama, in contrast, the triumph of the year-long boycott of the city’s segregated buses was met with jubilation. Jo Ann Robinson, a local black teacher and civic leader who had done as much as anyone to make the victory possible, recalled how she and many of the city’s activists “just rejoiced together. We had won self-respect … we felt that we were somebody … we had forced the white man to give what we knew was a part of our own citizenship.” Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization – proclaimed that the boycott had demonstrated before the whole world that black people possessed the “capacity for sustained collective action”, and that “non-violent resistance to racial tyranny” could succeed. He even described Montgomery as the “peace capital of a new liberation movement.”

But the path to racial equality would not be a smooth one: it would take another ten years of hard struggle to finally sweep away segregation, and secure first-class citizenship rights for black Americans, across the South. Even the victory in Montgomery proved to have a nasty sting in the tail, as the turn of the year witnessed a spate of shootings and bombings, an ugly campaign of intimidation that silenced white moderates, and a tightening of the city’s other segregation laws. In March 1957, for instance, the City Commission declared it “unlawful for white and colored persons to play together, or, in company with each other … in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, pool, billiards, softball, basketball, baseball, football, golf, track, and at swimming pools, beaches, lakes or ponds or any other game or games or athletic contests, either indoors or outdoors.” And when local civil rights activists filed suit to desegregate the municipal parks the following year, the city commission promptly closed them all; they would not re-open until February 1965. In August 1957, eight months after the boycott that she had inspired had ended, Rosa Parks – unable to find regular work, worn down by constant death threats, and in poor health – abandoned Montgomery (though not her commitment to political activism) for Detroit.

During 1956, people across the globe spoke out, filled the streets and city squares, risked arrest and took up arms to demand their freedom. Their exhilarating triumphs and shattering defeats transformed the world – sometimes in unexpected or unpredictable ways. As we stand amidst the wreckage of 2016, contemplating an uncertain and perhaps unsettling future, we would do well to recall the New York Times editorial of December 30, 1956:

‘Tomorrow’s midnight … will remorselessly arrive, and so will the pain, the hope, the fear, the ecstasy that years bring. But whether what comes … after … is a new dawn or a polar darkness we cannot yet know: all we can do is to summon up our courage and our wisdom and go forward.’